There’s no debating that instant communication is critical to a company’s success, with email serving as the primary communications means of choice for most enterprises. Yet, companies seem to be behind the eight ball when it comes to the use of email archiving and email protection.

 

The cost and manpower needed to roll out such a project are the biggest challenges impeding many firms from deploying the practice, according to Brad Senter, marketing manager for Ipswitch Inc.’s message division.

 

In an interview with TMCnet – printed in full below – Senter talks about how state and federal regulations are driving the need for enterprises to develop a system to properly archive their email. And as more sensitive information finds its way on the network, businesses also need to take precautions to ensure that their email is secure from malicious software and other attacks, Senter said.

 

During the Q&A, Senter discussed the use of instant-messaging as a communication tool in corporate settings and how the Ipswitch Instant Messaging service is a critical component to ensure the security of such messages.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

Brad Senter (pictured left): Organizations of all sizes are finding that the need to securely archive and rapidly produce email is not just a requirement for the financial services industry any more. New state and federal rules mandating proper email archiving practices are forcing companies of all verticals to evaluate and implement email archiving technology. There have been more than a few recent stories in the news where companies, schools, and municipalities have been subject to litigation simply because they had no archiving and e-Discovery solutions in place. The Challenge: Many of these institutions are operating with limited financial and human resources required to manage such a project.

Ipswitch seeks to meet customer demand on two fronts by offering both installed and hosted email archiving solutions. Our installed solution, MailArchiva Enterprise Edition, resides on a server that the organization has physical access to. MAEE archives all incoming, outgoing and internal email with easy retrieval and e-Discovery via an administrative interface. Our hosted solution, Sonian Hosted Email Archiving, utilizes the Amazon cloud to archive all incoming, outgoing, and internal email. SHEA also allows an administrator or an approved third party to search and retrieve all email from a highly intuitive control panel. Both solutions are fully featured and provide support for both compliance archiving, as well as storage resource management.

 

BS: IMail is specifically designed to provide security at the server level. Through strategic partnerships we provide both anti-spam and anti-virus solutions to provide bulletproof protection for the investment you have made in your messaging server.

 

Our anti-virus partnerships display proactive layers of defense provided by BitDefender or Symantec (News - Alert). IMail Anti-Virus powered by BitDefender provides a high-speed, multi-thread architecture with low memory consumption. All email traffic, whether incoming or outgoing is scanned before delivery and it provides both local and virtual domain scanning. Requiring minimal maintenance, IMail Anti-Virus powered by BitDefender updates virus definitions weekly and when major outbreaks occur. IMail Anti-Virus powered by Symantec takes your protection one step further by also including spyware and adware scanning, administrator alerts, and uninterrupted definition updates.

 

BS: With our most recent product release we announced our most advanced security offering: IMail Server Premium Security Bundle. The Security Bundle meets the needs of small to mid-sized businesses by providing secure, powerful and straight-forward messaging capabilities with multiple layers of protection. IMail Server Premium Security Bundle combines the ease-of-use and reliability included in IMail Server with IMail Anti-Virus powered by Symantec and the industry's leading premium anti-spam technology from Commtouch (News - Alert). Utilizing a multi-layered approach, Commtouch's advanced detection is able to block over 98 percent of spam, phishing, and malware while maintaining the industry's lowest false positive level.

Commtouch's edge protection efficiently stops the majority of unwanted emails from ever entering your network, saving on both bandwidth and infrastructure costs. By accessing real-time IP reputation data provided by Commtouch's GlobalView Mail Reputation service, IMail Server Premium can block malicious senders during the SMTP transaction, before any data has been sent.

 

Commtouch's Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) technology analyzes large volumes of Internet traffic in real-time rather than evaluating each individual message. The result is instant protection from new outbreaks - far ahead of signatures or software updates. This unique content-agnostic technology detects and blocks spam in any language and is also highly effective against image-based spam.

 

With the unbeatable combination of Commtouch's near-perfect spam detection, low false positives and easy integration, IMail Server Premium and IMail Server Premium Security Bundle achieves the industry's best spam detection and accuracy.

 

BS: Instant Messaging is a collaboration technology that allows co-workers to use their computer to instantly communicate with one another singly or in groups. Instant Messaging eliminates communication gaps between people and departments. These benefits translate directly into efficiency and productivity.

 

As an easy installation and integration with Microsoft (News - Alert) Windows Environment, the Ipswitch Instant Messaging server offers a fast, easily managed server that operates inside your firewall and provides organizations with a secure, private IM network. Unlike free consumer oriented instant messaging tools such as Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL (News - Alert) that offer no encryption, Ipswitch Instant Messaging ensures confidentiality and security of an organization's information and protects storing conversations on the server for quick access and easy retrieval. Another feature of Ipswitch Instant Messaging includes the ability for end users to recall previous conversations with its ability to historically store user conversations. This feature is a key administrative benefit that ensures everything sent via the IM is logged and can be produced if ever needed for eDiscovery or legal investigation.

 

For many organizations instant messaging is used as an alternate for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, email, and face-to-face conversations. Another benefit of Ipswitch Instant Messaging is that conversations typically tend to be briefer between coworkers when using instant messaging than with other forms of communications. Because of its unique system, instant messaging allows users to check the availability of co-workers at a glance and control how and when they communicate with one another. Users can also save or print those conversations and spell check in real time before their messages are sent.

 

Finally for end users, Ipswitch Instant Messenger is remarkably easy to learn and to use. Unlike many collaboration tools, Ipswitch Instant Messaging provides a familiar intuitive interface, which users will clearly understand and use effectively.